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2012 Review and 2013 Technical Goals

Wow, 2013 already… Time to checkout what happened with my 2012 goals and to set new goals for 2013 🙂

Let’s see the goals from 2012:

“First – Read, read, read”

Well, this one I nailed it! Had the opportunity to read many great books, like the Pragmatic Programmer, Design Patterns (Gang of Four), Clean Coder, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Refactoring (Improving the Design of Existing Code), xUnit Test Patterns, Driving Technical Change, Learning jQuery, Practical API Design – Confessions of a Java Framework Architect, jUnit in Action, Clean Coder and probably more (the Amazon LinkedIn app is gone and I can’t seem to find a way to reactivate it).

Things to Learn – Git, Html5, Mobile, NoSQL, IOS

Well this one I almost failed completely on my predictions. I did not learn anything related to IOS, NoSQL, very little hands-on with Mobile and Html5 but I started using Git (still a newbie though). Sad…

XEO Community

Very sad about this one, not only did I not have time to contribute, but the community around it is still non-existent and I don’t believe 2013 will be a better year, but I’ll have to wait to see that.

The Blog

Oh boy… I wrote like 3 posts in 2012? Complete failure… I guess I always want to do great (as in big) posts and end up quitting (or not having ideas nor time). Especially time, I do not commit enough to the blog. I always end up giving more priority to other stuff.

Ok, so 2012 was C- in terms of goals achieved. The books were a success while everything else was fairly low.

Goals for 2013

So my goals for 2013 will be the following:

Regarding my learning goals, I still want to read a lot and probably re-read some books again. Especially books like Working with Legacy Code, Refactoring, xUnit Test Patterns and Practical API Design which I believe I’ll extract great value from a second read where I already know the contents and can explore with a different (more mature) mind set.

Html5 and Mobile will play an important part of my year. I’m up for Microsoft’s HTML5+CSS3 Certification in February so I guess I’m really going to pick this up (want to try and use Bootstrap as well). While Mobile (I believe) will become a very active topic in my professional environment, so I’ll probably come back to this 😉

I want to really understand git and make the best use out of it (probably start using my GitHub account to push some content, more on that latter). Probably use Ant more often (I still need a lot of google to do something) and I really need to improve my Linux skills as they are handy.

XEO Community – I don’t think there will be much to say about this, but I’m committed to make two contributions to the community (probably through github). The first is probably about 80% complete and the second about 75% so I think we’ll see some action there.

Regarding the blog I think that I will try to write more by using a blog as the tool where I can post about small things I learned (things that would come up in a google search for “javac ant with line numbers” and stuff like that). I hope to be able to write more often like this.